Sunday, September 28, 2014

General RPGs' Endings' Disproportionate Importance

Before we begin, there's an RPG Kickstarter that you might be interested in: Graywalkers: Purgatory. This is actually a returning Kickstarter, in that the last time it was up, it didn't get funded in time. But as it seems to be a combination of Fallout, Shin Megami Tensei, and Shadowrun, and thus should by every right be perhaps the coolest thing ever conceived, I'm hoping that this time it'll hit its goal. Check it out, and throw it a pledge if you think it looks interesting!

Today’s rant is about a fairly general subject that really can apply to a great many things, but since it does have relevance to RPGs, and since I’ll be looking at it from that angle, I figure it’s legit.

It’s a funny thing. A few months ago, I played The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, while it was still relatively new. I was going to hold off on it until later on, once the price had dropped, but my good friend Queelez, who is super awesome, described the game to me in terms I might almost call glowing. Additionally, I’d just heard that the heads of Nintendo had decided to cover the costs of the company’s losses on the Wii U by cutting their own salaries rather than laying any of their employees off, which is what they did for the 3DS as well, and damn if that didn’t just fill me once more with incredible respect and admiration for Nintendo. How many companies in the world exist, on any level and of any size, that would do such a thing even once, let alone twice? The people running Nintendo are truly some noble and morally upstanding individuals, and I wanted to support them as much as possible, so I got the new Zelda the next day.

Anyway, my Nintendo praise aside, I played The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, and, well, it is, as I said, a funny thing. I didn’t really think that much of it. Oh, to be sure, I’d say it’s in the upper half of TLoZ titles, because its story is very slightly creative, it has a few elements of storytelling that are subtle but notable, and a few of its characters are fairly decent. It all adds up to an okay RPG, but that’s a hell of a lot better than so many other story-light, character depth-lacking TLoZ titles with utterly stagnant narrative creativity. I didn’t dislike it, anyway, but it didn’t strike me as anything particularly memorable or interesting, either. But once I’d finished the game, and the ending was over and done with, that’s when the funny thing happened: I realized that my immediate post-game impression of The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, my feelings for it immediately after finishing the title, were actually very positive, as though I had just come away from a good RPG, even a great one! I was feeling as satisfied as I had at the end of, say, Radiant Historia, or Okage: Shadow King, or Final Fantasy 6--all of which were far superior RPGs to this one.

The reason for this? Quite simply, it’s because the very best part of The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is indisputably its finale, the final confrontation of the game and its ending. The last battle is cool, the character reveal of the true villain of the game is, if not entirely unexpected, still engrossing and affecting, the return and reveal of Ravio is great, as is his dialogue with the villain, and the final part of the ending, the generous, epic act of kindness on the part of Link and Zelda toward Hilda and her kingdom...it all comes together as something powerful, and good, and memorable, and it makes the entire adventure seem to have been so much better, to have been worth so much more, for what it all led to. Objectively, rationally, I force myself to remember that most of the game did not impress me and judge it as merely okay. Personally, emotionally, I cannot help but reflect with pleased satisfaction upon The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds.

Another story. A couple years ago, I played Mass Effect 3.* Though not perfect (weak premise of relying on a plot-convenient, inexplicable ancient doohickey like roughly 80% of all other RPGs in existence, the laziness of the Tali’s face reveal, the stupidity of Kai Leng, and goddam Diana Allers were all noticeable flaws), it was overall a great experience, filled with terrific characters, breathtakingly excellent writing, some truly amazing scenes, and emotion like you wouldn’t believe, all while maintaining the awesomeness and majesty of Mass Effect, a series which had become a true highlight in the history of science fiction. It was everything I could reasonably have wanted from a conclusion to the Mass Effect series, the perfect, mind-blowing conclusion to the epic saga. For 30+ hours, I was utterly enthralled.

When I finished the game, I was a broken, hate-filled man with a hollow feeling in my soul that persists to this day.

For the hours, days, weeks, months immediately following my completion of Mass Effect 3, I did not remember the beauty of the scenes in which the Genophage is cured. I did not recall the great coming together of Geth and Quarian, united finally and able to lay their past to rest through the the sacrifice of Legion. I did not think of the tear-inducing beauty of Charr’s poem, nor that of Thane’s final scene. I did not consider just how awesome Commander Shepard, the Chuck Norris of space, had been throughout. The countless positive parts of Mass Effect 3, both grand and tiny, that come together over the course of the game to make it so incredibly excellent as to defy description--all of that was lost to me. All I felt, looking back on it, was betrayed, and disgusted.

The reason for this? The same one that would later skew my hindsight of TLoZALBW, just in reverse: the game’s ending. I’ve spoken about this many, manytimes, and most of those times have been at length, but here it is again: Mass Effect 3’s ending is horrible beyond comprehension; it is poison to every moment of the series preceding it. The ending of ME3 violently throws aside the values of the series so far. It utterly destroys Shepard’s character and the ideals that he or she represents. It makes less sense than Tommy Wiseau’s The Room--in fact, if it were revealed that Tommy Wiseau had been the one to write out the explanations that the Catalyst hologram kid says, I would be exactly 0% surprised. It cheapens the power, threat, and effect of the series’s antagonists. It tries to shift the entire tone of the series away from what it is and try to make it what it isn’t--like if you ineptly pasted the ending of an abandoned first draft of an Isaac Asimov imitation book onto Star Wars. Its arguments and themes are proven wrong not only by basic rational thought, but also by the prior events of the game itself. It shifts aside all the major themes of the series and tries to convince us that one of the secondary themes was, in fact, the important one all along. It disregards the element of player choice that has been present from the beginning of Mass Effect, and for that matter, also disregards the possibility of following a Paragon course of action, since Shepard’s choices are essentially to either kill an entire sapient race, disregard all his beliefs regarding the dangers of using power greater than that which you’ve earned (which has been one of the cautionary themes of the series, too) and do exactly what he just prevented the main villain from doing, die in failure, or utterly violate every single organism in the universe’s right to bodily self-determination in order to immediately do what the antagonists essentially wanted anyway.

And by the way, I’m speaking right now of the ending as of Bioware’s attempt to fix it with the Extended Cut. Their first try was actually even worse.

Anyway, this ending is so vile that it made me forget everything great that had led up to it. It worsens all that came before it, a retroactively toxic thing that sours all one’s previous enjoyment with the realization that everything that had been good was all just leading up to this. Up until the ending, Mass Effect 3 was easily one of the greatest RPGs I’d ever played, better even than the first title...and yet all that remained in me once it was finished was hollow, hopeless distaste.

Thankfully, though, cases like The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds outnumber ones like Mass Effect 3. Of the RPG finales and endings I’ve seen that have significantly changed my immediate impression of their games, most have been positive. I can think of several good cases off the top of my head (Valkyrie Profile 1, Startropics 1, and Makai Kingdom) that have altered my perspective on the game for the better, whereas the only case where the disproportionately bad ending affected my overall feelings of the game that I can recall is the example above, Mass Effect 3.

Endings are important and endings are powerful. I think a lot of people, many of them the ones writing and developing games and other forms of storytelling, underestimate just what an effect an ending can have. It doesn’t seem possible, or even right, that a small, 10 - 30 minute period of a game could so significantly alter an opinion that has been forged by a prior 20 to 50 hours of experience with the game...and yet the simple fact is that they can and they do. They’re the last experience we have with the story, and that gives them a better chance to be the part of the game we remember the most, simply for the fact that we tend to remember the recent more clearly than the long past. In addition, no matter what good or bad has happened during the course of the game, the ending to it is where it was all headed, and as such, the ending’s quality naturally is going to color how you see the game’s events. With an ending so good it’s out of place, suddenly everything leading up to the ending can seem better, not for its own sake but for the sake that we know now that it led to something worthwhile. Conversely, with an ending so bad it’s out of place, the events that lead up to it might no longer seem as good, because for all their worth on their own, you’re naturally going to see them and remember that great though this or that moment may be, ultimately they’re just leading to the lousy conclusion.

I’m not saying that every ending IS important and powerful, mind, nor even that every ending should be. The majority of RPG endings I’ve seen have not been disproportionately important to the overall quality of the game. In most cases, the endings are as good or bad as the game would lead us to expect (as examples, Chrono Trigger’s ending is excellent, but everything leading up to it is, too, and Suikoden 4 has a hellishly boring ending, but no one could possibly have expected anything else from it). All an ending NEEDS to do, really, is conclude the work while more or less maintaining the game’s status quo for quality, and that’s what they usually accomplish.

But the potential to disproportionately affect an audience is there in an ending, the potential to significantly and permanently alter the player’s opinion in a positive or negative way, to suddenly elevate the game beyond the sum of its parts or to be the moment where it trips at the finish line. And as I said, people do often seem to underestimate, or deliberately downplay, this importance of endings. As an example of that downplaying, I remember that in the case of the Mass Effect 3 ending, Bioware, utterly shameless and unrepentant, made a mighty push in its advertising of the game to emphasize that “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.”** A charming misrepresentation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s words, truly an adorably transparent attempt to savagely twist his original intent to serve the dishonorable and greedy desires of the amoral, soulless automatons in Bioware’s marketing department, but all the same, I once someone respond to this Bioware misquote with a considerably wiser saying:

“Many would walk through Hell to get to Heaven. Few would walk through Heaven to get to Hell.”

* Hands up if you don’t see where I’m going with this. No hands? Yeah.

** Pictorial evidence: This is an actual, legit example of their ad campaign after the first wave of players went apeshit over the game’s ending. Can’t decide if it’s more insulting or sad, really.

8 comments:

I'm pretty sure EA had to force Bioware to improve the ending and yeah, that one ad campaign was pretty conceited. I imagine it didn't help much eitbher, since acknowledging your product is flawed rlike that reppels customers.

The length of an ending can be pretty important gok, sometimes. Some games like rranigma have only around 5 minutes of cut scenes before the credits roll (though that's not the best example since the ending might still make you question why Ark fought if it resulted in him dying and the bird thing was somewhat poignant.)

Graywalkers appears interesting, though, and it does look like it has some SMT-esque themes and interesting in general I believe SMT If is in the process of being translated, too, though that's neither here nor there.

True, the length of the ending can be important. A lot of really good endings need enough time to say their piece...but a lot of them also kind of drag on a bit longer than they need to, too. And some short ones can be really good--I think Terranigma's ending is just great, very poignant, as you say. It's all about managing your time correctly, I suppose.

Graywalkers does seem pretty neat, and the people running it are open, friendly, and very eager to consider suggestions from their audience and act accordingly. During their first campaign, I pointed out that some of their female character designs were impractically sexy. They were very gracious about the criticism, and the current female designs are much better for it--not entirely fixed, I'd say, but MUCH more realistic and non-sexist than they were before. A gracious outlook on audience critique is by itself worth backing in my eyes, with the mainstream gaming industry so filled with assholes on every level as it is. And the game does look like it'll be really neat.

I'd love SMT If to be translated. Really, I just want ALL the SMT games translated and released over here. I can't get enough of'em.

Huh. Accepting feedback like that is pretty rare for creators, even indie devs that deal with less feedback. It sounds like it's worth buying if it gets funded.

Yeah,SMT games are consistently good, which is surprising for such a large series. I hear some of the handheld games (like Last Bible) are subpar, though. If is 80% complete, according to http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=smtif, so it might be released in 2015/16.

Aye, it's crazy, the level of consistent quality the SMT series has. Even their worst (Devil Survivor 2) is an okay RPG, and most are great or better. I'll really look forward to playing If when it's released.

Regarding Graywalkers, I have little doubt that it will be worth buying if it gets funded, but if you were to back it right now, you could get the game when it comes out for a mere $17 pledge. That's a hell of a good price for a new RPG. Honestly, sometimes I back RPG Kickstarters because I know I'll get the game eventually anyway, and it's usually gonna be cheaper through a Kickstarter pledge than it will be to buy it through normal means later. When I backed Cosmic Star Heroine, I knew darn well that it didn't need my pledge, as it had well surpassed its goal, but I figured I'd eventually be playing it anyhow, so why not get it for less than I would later?

Sorry for the aggressive marketing, but I'd like to do what small part I can for projects like Graywalkers, and if there's a chance I can convince any of my tiny readership to chip in their support, I'm gonna try.

After all the things I couldn't interest myself enough to dislike about Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, Link Between Worlds had a lot of what I was wanting for a while. No Ganon at long fucking last, some old school opportunities to fudge around with the recommended dungeon order, and a title that wasn't yet another Chapter 1 in a series that allegedly has a timeline. Puzzles weren't particularly elaborate most of the time, since they couldn't assume you had X number of tools, but the wall walking is mad fun and was utilized cleverly. It's a sort of Zelda that harkens back to earlier designs, and I've been hearing people here and there wanting some of that vintage crack for years. It's nice to have a break from whatever the fuck they've been trying to do since TP if not WW.

No mention of Valkyrie Profile: Silmeria? And I thought this was going to be a rant about disproportionately loaded endings. Or perhaps that's a disproportionately loaded endgame.

Well, see, Valkyrie Profile 2 does have the worst ending in history, that much is certainly true. It's meaningless, malicious slash-and-burn storytelling that has the unprecedented arrogance to unmake a classic, a TREASURE, of RPG history. So yeah, it does kind of qualify for what I'm talking about. But the truth of the matter is, as horrible as VP2's ending is, it's not like VP2 is a worthwhile game besides the ending. It's boring, it lacks any real theme or meaning, the plot is convoluted and poor, the characters are severely lacking depth and personality, there's no emotional or philosophical gravitas to it...it's just a garbage RPG. Its ending is horrible and insulting and retroactively destructive to the original Valkyrie Profile, but at the very least, I wasn't going to like VP2 anyway, so the power of my reaction was nothing like it was to Mass Effect 3. ME3 should have been fantastic, and the ending changed that, which is more of a case of disproportionate importance, to me, than a game that was already a waste of time becoming heinous.

Well, like I say, that is the case with most endings. All they really need to do is stay par for the course, do enough to leave you satisfied and not fuck anything up. And most of them do just that. It's only the rare exception that really exercises (or horrendously blunders) the disproportionate potential they have. But it is there.